This invention relates to meat scraping machines for scraping the freshly sawed surfaces of a piece of meat, and more particularly to a scraper blade for engaging and scraping the sawed surfaces of the meat to remove accumulated residues from the meat as the meat is driven through the machine.
The faces of sawed meat have been cleaned customarily for reasons of sanitation and appearance. Sawing usually leaves residues of coagulated blood, bone dust, marrow, meat particles, fat, and so on, which may be unappealing to customers as they view the meat in the market. It has therefore been common practice to scrape and clean the freshly sawed meat before it is put on display.
In view of the time and labor involved in manually scraping each piece of meat, it has long been desirable to automate this process. Until recently, however, most efforts have been unsuccessful. Foremost among the causes have been the problems of accommodating meats of all sizes and thicknesses, and of meeting the very strict sanitation requirements of the Federal Department of Agriculture (FDA), the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF), and various state agencies. A successful machine must therefore be highly versatile, thorough, and quick, and it must also be completely sanitary in operation and quickly and easily cleanable after use.
Meat scraping machines such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,389,414; 3,439,369; 3,478,380; 3,606,628; 3,781,936; 3,857,131; and 3,862,682 represent significant improvements in automating the scraping of sawed meats and reduce the manual labor and time heretofore necessary. U.S. Pat. No. 3,781,936, in particular, discloses a meat scraping machine which has solved a number of prior art problems. It scrapes both faces of the meat automatically and quickly, and accepts the commonly encountered thicknesses. Most of the manual labor has been eliminated, and the machine produces a product which is highly appealing to the consumer.
Other patents of interest include U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,817,862; 2,929,088; 2,826,772; 2,154,187; 2,314,700; 2,753,590; 1,670,809; 3,102,290; and 3,579,697.